Review: Narrator’s Constant Voice Adds Human Touch to Bastion

Enemies will surround you from all sides on the cataclysmic platforms of Bastion.Image courtesy Supergiant Games

Whether we’re watching sports or driving to work, we take a certain pleasure in hearing informed, entertaining voices on our televisions and radios. A great announcer, commentator or narrator can make everything better.

Bastion, a downloadable action role-playing game to be released Wednesday for Xbox 360, embraces this idea wholeheartedly. A narrator voices over the entire RPG. Masterfully played by first-time videogame actor Logan Cunningham, Bastion‘s gruff narrator is the game. His play-by-play turns what could have been just another hack-and-slash adventure into a haunting, poignant experience. Cunningham’s soothing voice stays with you for the five or six hours you’ll spend beating the main story mode of Bastion, and it might just stay with you for a while after that.

Bastion‘s narrator talks about what you’re doing, what you’re seeing and sometimes even what you’re feeling, offering up tidbits and stories that add an authentically human emotion to the game’s cartoony, abstract world.

Bastion‘s fantasy world doesn’t feel derivative. Its world and characters are all its own, and the narrator’s verbal descriptions of abandoned quarries, forsaken gods and terrifying fortresses breathe life into them.

“Windbags ain’t much different than normal folks,” he says as you crush one of the game’s enemies with your hammer. “All they want is a place to stay and a decent meal.”

It makes smashing them that much harder.

You take the part of the Kid, a silent boy with no name who wakes up and finds that his entire world has been destroyed by an event called the Calamity. Proper procedure calls for all survivors to evacuate to a device called the Bastion, so the Kid makes his way over there only to find that it’s been dismantled, and there’s only one other survivor. As the game progresses, the narrator slowly unravels the mysteries behind what happened, why it happened and how the survivors of the Calamity can move on.

The rest of the game is just as well-crafted. Developer Supergiant Games is a small team based out of a living room in a house in San Jose, California, and you can feel the intimacy; the entire game drips with passionate artistry from the gorgeous watercolor aesthetics to the stirring soundtrack.

Bastion has a simple gameplay mechanic; you use just three buttons to attack monsters with a large variety of special abilities and weapons from the simple Cael Hammer to the devastating Calamity Cannon. You progress along a series of floating platforms, barges and post-apocalyptic remnants of the city of Caelondia and its surrounding areas, destroying bad guys as you go.

As you adventure, you’re tasked with rebuilding the Bastion. This will give you increasing access to buildings like the Distillery, which lets you equip stat-boosting beverages, the Shrine, which lets you select new modes that increase the game’s difficulty and the Arsenal, which lets you assign weapons and abilities to each button slot.

One unfortunate side effect of this system is that if you find a new weapon while adventuring, you have no choice but to equip it. In order to reequip your older weapons, you’ll have to find an Arsenal. While some levels contain Arsenals, not all of them do, and in a game with this many options it’s annoying to be stuck with weapons or abilities you don’t want.

Sometimes Bastion feels like a Western; other times it feels like a ghost story. Cunningham’s narrator ties the whole thing together, and you’ll want to keep playing and playing just to listen to his vivid, powerful descriptions.